As another World Press Freedom Day arrives, news media organizations will dutifully display lists of journalists imprisoned or killed around the world, from Belarus to Myanmar. It is important to acknowledge these victims. But it’s also time to recognize that analysts and policymakers need a new framework to understand how a new generation of authoritarian leaders disables critical coverage without putting journalists in jail or physically harming them.
As today’s autocrats—and aspiring autocrats, such as former U.S. President Donald Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni—seek to acquire and keep power, they are often careful to avoid measures that are reminiscent of the 20th century’s violent dictatorships. Instead, they follow what social scientists Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman call the “spin dictator” model. This approach relies on controlling information flows: Autocratic governments are still holding elections—many of them free—but they ensure that these elections are never fair. They tilt the political playing field through tactics such as implementing legal measures that harm opposition parties’ chances and manipulating the media landscape.
In regimes that seek to avoid outright repression, unilaterally shaping public opinion is a crucial precondition for winning elections. Yet while it’s true that “the media” is under attack, it’s not helpful to think of it as a monolithic target. As autocratic leaders develop new tactics, speaking of “the media” is a grammatical, conceptual, and—above all—political mistake. We need a more fine-grained understanding of how today’s autocrats seek to control public opinion by using different techniques against three specific targets: individual journalists, the press as a collective actor, and the owners of news media organizations.
Authoritarian leaders and their aspirants have developed and shared a number of tactics to control or silence individual journalists. One very crude way to do this is to turn to lawsuits. For instance, the far-right Meloni—celebrated by commentators for becoming more moderate in office—successfully sued prominent investigative journalist Roberto Saviano for libel after he criticized her and another far-right leader, Matteo Salvini. The penalty was only around $1,050—and he would only have to pay if he repeated the offense—but the action sent a clear and threatening message to other reporters in Italy.
Leaders also intimidate journalists in more informal but arguably more insidious ways. One common tactic they use is to systematically discredit journalists as biased against their administrations. This leads journalists, under relentless political pressure, to practice what media critic Jay Rosen calls “refuge-seeking” rather than truth-seeking: They try to insulate themselves from charges of partisanship by presenting all perspectives on an issue as valid—what in the United States is known as “bothsidesism.” Under normal circumstances, this is a respectable practice. But as reporters try to counter charges of bias, they give credence to proto-authoritarian, pseudoscientific, or fringe views, including those only kept alive by lobbyists and special interests. (Climate change denial is one example.)
The leadership of news organizations can also cave, as shown by CNN’s infamous 2023 “town hall” with Trump, much criticized even within the network. At the time, CNN’s new leadership was concerned that the network had alienated conservative viewers. To remedy this, CNN decided to interview Trump in front of what turned out to be an audience of his supporters. What followed was a comprehensive failure of journalism at the individual level (the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, was no match for Trump) and the institutional level (CNN effectively aired a commercial for Trump’s 2024 election campaign).
The lesson should be clear: Authoritarian leaders weaponize traditional journalistic ethics centered on newsworthiness, balance, and objectivity. In attempting to prove their innocence, journalists end up playing—and usually losing—their game. The proper response should not be to exclude politically dangerous figures from all coverage, but to avoid covering them in a framework of their own choosing. These politicians should not determine an interview’s agenda or setting, and they need to face journalists who ask hard questions, not ones who are satisfied with outrageous quotes that will boost traffic but harm democracy.
Anti-democratic leaders have also learned to attack the press as a collective actor. One way they do this is by sowing division among members of the press. Although journalists compete with each other, ideally they share an ethos defined by a commitment to holding the powerful accountable and finding what U.S. journalist Carl Bernstein called “the best obtainable version of the truth.” Less obviously, this ethos should also include a commitment to each other—a basic solidarity, compatible with competition, such that an attack on one is understood as an attack on all.
But in the United States, for instance, those commitments have faltered. In a tactic that escalated in 2020, Trump would pick on individual members of the White House press corps, ridiculing them, defaming them, refusing to answer them, or even removing them from the room. As a seasoned reality TV actor, Trump enjoyed the performance of feuding with reporters, especially female ones. (Collins was once banned for asking Trump inconvenient questions.) Other journalists had a choice to keep cooperating and fall victim to a Trumpian game of divide and rule or to defend the press as a collective—for example, by walking out and agreeing on tough rules of engagement with Trump in the future. At the time, they chose the former.
Leaders also weaken the Fourth Estate as a collective actor by refusing to give regular press conferences. Narendra Modi has never given a solo press conference as India’s prime minister, relying instead on his extraordinary personality cult centered on mass rallies and the sophisticated use of social media. Meloni also likes to avoid press conferences and prefers to communicate to the public with carefully curated videos. In the past, politicians needed a professional press corps; today, they can often circumvent it through social media.
Finally, autocrats ensure that news media organizations cannot operate properly, including by attacking their owners. (“News media organizations” is a pedantic mouthful, but a necessary one, given that plenty of professional media organizations have nothing to do with what Dame Frances Cairncross’s 2019 report on journalism in the United Kingdom called “public interest news”). Public broadcasters can be filled with partisans, cronies can buy private news media organizations and make them subservient to the government, and governments can harass outlets with tax investigations.
Sometimes, leaders silence critical outlets in ways that are hard to trace. In 2014, Nepszabadsag, Hungary’s major opposition newspaper, was acquired by an Austrian firm, Vienna Capital Partners, which formed a subsidiary for its interests in Hungary. The subsidiary closed the paper, which was critical of the government, in 2016, citing financial reasons. But the journalists working at the paper had every reason to suspect that Orban was to blame.
Authoritarians with a stronger grip on power or greater geopolitical leverage tend to be more shameless. In 2009, Turkey’s tax authorities fined Dogan Media Group $2.5 billion for alleged tax fraud after then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government accused its founder, Aydin Dogan, of using his outlets to defame the administration. Erdogan said he had no control over the case, but many observers in Turkey saw the decision as a political move to silence critical media outlets. Eventually, Dogan sold all media assets, including popular TV channel CNN Turk, to a conglomerate that is mainly active in construction and real estate and, above all, friendly toward Erdogan.
There are no easy ways to counter such attacks, especially those presented as financial moves. It is hard enough to measure media pluralism in practice, let alone promote it. (U.S. journalist A. J. Liebling famously observed that there was only freedom of the press for those who owned one.) Yet the situation is not hopeless, and sometimes outsiders can make a difference. For example, foreign news media organizations can choose whether they want to sell to oligarchs allied with an autocratic regime, and democratic governments can incentivize them not to do so.
As today’s strongmen employ new tactics, they take great care to maintain plausible deniability. Liberal bloggers can still criticize Orban, and even investigative journalism is tolerated in Hungary to some degree. In Turkey, some critical low-circulation outlets have survived. But especially in more repressive regimes, TV and local newspapers are now largely under the control of governments invested in controlling public opinion and, increasingly, spreading disinformation to do so.
In the 1990s, many Westerners were under the illusion that only democracies were capable of learning from their experience, while autocracies were incapable of reckoning with their mistakes and would all end like the Soviet Union. Three decades later, it’s clear that they were wrong: Autocrats are learning from history, and they are developing techniques that have repressive effects but do not look all that repressive.
Of course, we should not go from one extreme to the other and assume that today’s autocrats are invincible. But to counter them and support “the media,” we need to appreciate the difference between strengthening the resistance of individual journalists, the resilience of the press as a collective, and the economic and legal staying power of independent news media organizations.